Category: Newsletters

From Bloomberg: “Advanced poker software is now widely available for a few hundred dollars. Forums are full of accusations about everyone from anonymous, low-stakes fish to sponsored professionals. All the big platforms promote a zero-tolerance policy, but no one seems to know how many bots are out there or where they come from. “It’s a scourge,” one gambling executive told me. When I started investigating poker bots, I came across an obscure chatroom thread posted by a whistleblower describing an operation so large it resembled an international corporation. It had a board of directors, training programs and an HR department—everything, it seemed, but a water cooler. Allegedly based in Siberia, the group was said to have absorbed all potential rivals in the region, becoming known as Bot Farm Corporation, or BF Corp. I decided to find out the truth about BF Corp., by following a trail of leaked internal emails, and by conducting interviews with players, gambling executives, security consultants and botmakers. When I finally tracked down BF’s Siberian creators, they agreed to an interview.”

Her children were sick and no one knew why. Was it forever chemicals on the farm?

From the New York Times: “Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine. Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down. At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children’s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels. Unknown to them, her family’s beloved organic farm had been fertilized decades earlier with sewage sludge tainted by a dangerous class of chemicals linked to certain cancers, liver disease and a host of other health problems. Their cattle had grazed on contaminated pastures, making the beef and milk too dangerous to eat. Yet her family had been eating it for several years.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The Russian bot army that conquered online poker”

From New York: “In 1998, a prematurely silver-haired, baby-faced priest named C. John McCloskey was dispatched by Opus Dei, the secretive right-wing Roman Catholic group, to Washington, D.C., to minister to some of the world’s most powerful men. He arrived at the Catholic Information Center, which the organization runs, on K Street, the lobbying district of the nation’s capital. Father John is gone — removed from his post by a sex-abuse scandal, he died last year — but the CIC is still on K Street. it is focused on marshaling the people who have various forms of authority over the masses (Opus Dei reportedly calls them the “intellectuals”) to its various revanchist causes. The group targets, and attracts, people like Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance, a convert to conservative Catholicism by way of Opus Dei–connected clergy and influencers. Opus Dei runs colleges and elite private schools as well as institutions like the CIC, all designed to attract and mold the influential.”

Doctors customize brain surgery so patient doesn’t lose his ability to play chess

From Scientific American: “Last year, when doctors told a patient that the headaches he was experiencing were due to a highly invasive brain tumor called a glioblastoma that could only be removed during a complex surgery, he had one very specific request. He wanted the surgeons to make sure to preserve his ability to play chess. The man, a then-45-year-old computer programmer, was identified only as “AB.” He had been playing the game as a hobby for 25 years and had achieved an Elo rating of 1,950, which is just one level below expert in the chess world. Surgeons performed a craniotomy, removing a piece of skull to expose a portion of AB’s left superior parietal lobe while he was awake. Next they touched a live electrode to different spots on the surface of his cerebral cortex, asking him to answer questions and complete tasks in order to determine whether his cognitive abilities remained intact at the targeted spot.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “How a secretive right-wing Catholic cult took over DC”

When I read news and opinion pieces about TikTok, the video-sharing app owned by China-based ByteDance, it often reminds me of the old parable about the blind men and the elephant: when they touch the animal, each of the men touches a different part, and therefore he thinks it is something different — the one who touches the trunk thinks it is a snake, the one who touches the leg thinks it is a tree, and so on. In TikTok’s case, younger users who enjoy scrolling through the videos probably see it as a harmless distraction; older users who don’t spend any time on it probably think of it as a massive waste of time; and a number of legislators in Congress appear to see it as a dangerous psy-op designed by the Chinese government as a way of gathering data on American users and/or targeting them with misinformation and propaganda.

When I started writing this newsletter, I realized that I’ve been writing about the supposed dangers of TikTok, and the plans to either force ByteDance to sell or make TikTok illegal, for four years now. I first wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review in September of 2020, after then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok. Trump said he did it because the app “threatens the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” but even at the time it was clear that the ban was driven by a desire to do hurt China, which had become an economic powerhouse. The US had blocked mergers involving Chinese companies and imposed sanctions on of Chinese firms like Huawei, a maker of telecom equipment, and China had retaliated by hacking into US federal databases and the credit agency Equifax.

Even then, security experts said that TikTok was no more of a data or privacy risk than Facebook or Google. “I am the first to yell from the rooftops when there is a glaring privacy issue somewhere. But we just have not found anything we could call a smoking gun in TikTok,” security expert Will Strafach told The Associated Press in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump’s order soon sparked a frenzy of attempts by US companies to acquire TikTok, immediately sparked a race to acquire TikTok’s assets before the September deadline, with Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart all in the running. But those plans hit a roadblock when the Chinese government issued new restrictions on the sale or export of artificial-intelligence software, which would include TikTok’s recommendation algorithms.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The crusade against TikTok is a ridiculous waste of time”

From The Conversation: “The rings of Saturn are some of the most famous and spectacular objects in the Solar System. Earth may once have had something similar. In a paper published last week in Earth & Planetary Science Letters, my colleagues and I present evidence that Earth may have had a ring. Around 466 million years ago, a lot of meteorites started hitting Earth. We know this because many impact craters formed in a geologically brief period. In the same period we also find deposits of limestone across Europe, Russia and China containing very high levels of debris from a certain type of meteorite. The meteorite debris in these sedimentary rocks show signs that they were exposed to space radiation for much less time than we see in meteorites that fall today. Using models of how Earth’s tectonic plates moved in the past, we mapped out where all these craters were when they first formed. We found all of the craters are on continents that were close to the equator in this period.”

He decided to bring his Army friends some beers — when they were in Vietnam

From Now I Know: “In 1968, troops from the United States, South Vietnam, and Laos met the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in the Battle of Khe Sanh. There were nearly 100,000 combatants involved in the months-long skirmish, including 6,000 American Marines. Almost all of them were there to fight. But one of them, a Marine named Chickie Donohue, wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. He was just hoping to meet some friends and have a beer. In late 1967, Donohue was back in New York City, his hometown, drinking at a local bar. Antiwar protests had taken hold across the nation and the bartender — a former soldier named George “Colonel” Lynch (who was not, in fact, a colonel) wanted to do something to support the local boys serving in Vietnam. Half-jokingly, most likely, he suggested that someone should go to Vietnam and bring six of the bar’s regulars some beers. Donohue decided to turn the joke into reality.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Scientists say Earth may once have had a ring like Saturn”

From the New York Times: “Marie Cooper led her life according to her Christian faith. She baked pies for her neighbors in northern West Virginia, and said grace before even a bite of food. She watched Jimmy Swaggart, a televangelist preacher — a little too loudly, in her daughter Sherry Uphold’s opinion. And she always said that at the end of her life, she did not want to be resuscitated. Last winter, doctors found cancer cells in her stomach. She’d had “do not resuscitate” and “do not intubate” orders on file for decades and had just filled out new copies, instructing medical staff to withhold measures to restart her heart if it stopped, and to never give her a breathing tube. In February, Ms. Cooper walked into the hospital for a routine stomach scope to determine the severity of the cancer. After the procedure, Ms. Uphold visited her mother in the recovery room and saw her in a panic. Doctors restrained her and inserted a breathing tube down her throat, violating the wishes outlined in her medical chart.”

Sexually frustrated dolphin blamed for attacks that injured dozens of swimmers in Japan

From The Telegraph: “A lonely dolphin acting out of sexual frustration is believed to be the culprit behind a spate of attacks on swimmers in Japan this summer. Since July this year, 18 people have been hurt in dolphin attacks near the seaside town of Mihama, with some requiring dozens of stitches. Posters warning beachgoers of the menace feature an open-mouthed dolphin baring razor-like teeth. It says that the mammals “are known to be dangerous to humans” and to get out of the water if they are seen nearby. Japan’s problematic mammal is believed to be a solitary male bottlenose dolphin, who may also be responsible for injuring swimmers in 2022 and 2023, and trying to press his genitals against them. Putu Mustika, a lecturer and marine researcher at James Cook University in Australia, told The New York Times that dolphins can inadvertently harm humans by dint of their sheer strength when acting out mating behaviours.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Doctors saved her life but she didn’t want them to”

From NBC News: “Long before his bleak final years, when he struggled with mental illness and lived mostly on the streets, Victor Carl Honey joined the Army, serving honorably for nearly a decade. And so, when his heart gave out and he died alone 30 years later, he was entitled to a burial with military honors. Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country. A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.”

A treasure trove of over 20 million collectible baseball cards is finally revealed

From the New York Times: “In a former antique shop off a four-lane highway in rural Virginia, Tim Banazek knelt before a white banker’s box labeled “Autographed Baseballs” that was stashed at the bottom of a steel bookcase. He pulled the first ball out and examined the signature in the fluorescent light. It was Willie Mays’s. Every day, Mr. Banazek unearths new historic treasures from a collection of sports cards that he purchased in 2021 from a quiet hobbyist. But this is not just any assemblage. It is quite possibly the largest private collection of sports cards in the world — and probably by a wide margin. Mr. Banazek estimates that it includes 20 million cards, although other visitors have pegged the number even higher. For comparison, Paul Jones, a man in Idaho who claimed to have the largest private baseball card collection, told a local newspaper in 2020 that his holdings amounted to 2.8 million cards.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “This university cut up and sold unclaimed bodies”

From The Cut: “A few years later, when I was away at college, I learned that my father had been tapping the phone lines. My mother had been adamant: “I am not cheating. I am not a cheater. When do I have time to cheat?” But my father’s career in car sales had given him a sensitive radar for dishonesty. So starting when I was in high school, in the mid-1990s, he would climb into the attic after she went to bed and situate himself at a makeshift station he had equipped with wires, jacks, and recording devices.Dad’s goal was to gather evidence to use as leverage in the divorce. He also used the recordings to exact revenge. After he found out that Mom bought a slinky yellow dress — a dress he thought she certainly wasn’t planning to wear for him — he cut off her credit cards. I remember my father making copies of the tapes, packaging them neatly in brown paper, and sending them to some of our relatives in Ohio.”

Loos, lewdness, and literature from the 1700s: Tales from the Boghouse

From Public Domain Review: “The literary scholar Roger Lonsdale once suggested that our knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print. For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of “polite taste”. The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Among the works that would never have been a source of poems for the canon was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Her father tapped the phones and revealed a family mystery”

From Texas Monthly: “FBI Special Agent Curt Hunt was working in the yard of his San Antonio home one quiet Saturday morning when the call came in: The Texas Commerce Bank off Loop 410 had been robbed. Motor bank? In his 22 years as an agent, the intense, wiry Hunt had worked a lot of bank robberies—there are about twenty a year in San Antonio—but they almost always involved a robber walking into a bank lobby, pointing a gun at a teller, and demanding all the money in the drawer. How could anyone possibly get past the locked doors and bulletproof glass of a motor bank? It was September 21, 1991. Hunt rushed to the scene to begin investigating what would turn out to be the biggest bank robbery in San Antonio history. Grim bank officials told Hunt that someone had gotten away with almost $250,000—all the more astonishing considering that the average bank robber gets no more than $2,000. The robber had reached the vault—another rarity—and then made his escape so efficiently that a customer waiting several yards away for the bank to open did not even know there had been a robbery.”

Norwegian princess married a shaman who says he once came back from the dead

From the BBC: “Princess Märtha Louise, 52, and Durek Verrett, 49, announced their engagement in 2022. The princess – a former equestrian and the eldest of Norwegian King Harald’s two children – was previously married to the late writer and artist Ari Behn. Mr Verrett says on his site that he is a sixth generation shaman, “servant of god and energy activator” who “demystifies spirituality” through his “no-nonsense teachings”. In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he claimed to have risen from the dead and said that when he was a child a relative had predicted he would one day marry the princess of Norway.Märtha Louise has long attracted controversy in Norway for decades for her involvement in alternative treatments. In 2007, she announced she was clairvoyant and ran a school which taught students to “create miracles” and talk to angels.

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “When a lovestruck cop tried to pull off a massive bank heist”

In case you are a first-time reader, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in my inaugural post.) Since this is only the second edition of the newsletter, I am still working out some bugs, so if things seem a little out of place, bear with me.

In a way, this is a continuation of the newsletter I’ve been writing for the last few years about the intersection between technology and the media, as chief digital writer at the Columbia Journalism Review (you can find some of those pieces here, and they are also all published on my personal website.) As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I’ve been writing about tech and its impact for about 30 years or so, ever since the first web browser was invented.

For me, this newsletter is a return to the days when I used to write about tech on my personal blog. In the same way, there is no large entity or organization in between me and my readers now — it’s just me and you, figuring things out together. And maybe along the way, getting a sense of how much work my editors put into making me seem coherent. 😄

And with that, on to this week’s newsletter! Thanks for reading – and if you decide to subscribe, or you have already, thank you for that as well! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and/or give it a thumbs up or heart emoji or whatever on the network of your choice. None of these newsletters are behind a paywall at this point (I haven’t decided if I will do that in the future) and every issue is available via Ghost, through Substack, and on my website.

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Continue reading “The Second Circuit’s decision in the Internet Archive case is bad”

From Outside: “Ten minutes into his dive, Dave Shaw started to look for the bottom. Utter blackness pressed in on him from all sides, and he directed his high-intensity light downward, hoping for a flash of rock or mud. Shaw, a 50-year-old Aussie, was in an alien world, more than 800 feet below the surface pool that marks the entrance to Bushman’s Hole, a remote sinkhole in the Northern Cape province of South Africa and the third-deepest freshwater cave known to man. Only two divers had ever been to this depth in Bushman’s before. One of them, a South African named Nuno Gomes, had claimed a world record in 1996 when he hit bottom, on open-circuit gear, at 927 feet. Shaw touched down and started swimming. Suddenly, he stopped. About 50 feet to his left, perfectly illuminated in the gin-clear water, was a human body.”

A shocking crime divided a Minnesota town

From The Atavist: “Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk. But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “In a cave 800 feet down, divers found a human body”

From the New York Times: “The trip had been a long shot. Bob Garrison reminded himself of that as he stood on a pier a thousand miles from home. Behind him lay the tile-roofed beach town of San Clemente, Calif., his last stop. Before him stretched the Pacific Ocean, immense and unbound. Gulls cried. Surf broke. It was Monday, his last day. Mr. Garrison could afford only so much time off. And yet what if he was close? He had spent the last two days following up on leads, scouring parks, passing out fliers. “MISSING,” they said, in block letters over photos of a 45-year-old man from Seattle, 6 feet, 6 inches tall with a beard to his chest, an ice-ax tattoo and a silver cross necklace. On this June day, Mr. Garrison, an engineer from rural Ellensburg, Wash., was not thinking about California’s humanitarian crisis. He was just a 70-year-old man trying to rescue his son.”

How Mark Twain and Helen Keller formed a lifelong friendship

From Open Culture: “While many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth-century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that in Keller’s case may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s lives. Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests.” She would write, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve the enduring fame Twain had foreseen.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A father’s desperate search for a son who didn’t want to be found”

From The Economist: “One winter morning in 2022 I found myself being pushed, blindfolded, into a Taliban interrogation room in Kabul. A guard I couldn’t see shoved me into a chair. I heard the door close, then nothing. I had no idea why the Taliban had taken me. One possibility was that they might be trying to use me as a bargaining chip in their dealings with the West. My speculation was interrupted by a voice to my right telling me, in English, to remove my blindfold. When I did so I saw a powerfully built man sitting at a desk. He wore a black skullcap, and a bulky camouflage jacket which made him look even larger. For the next hour the man grilled me, trying to get me to admit I was a spy. Had I been to Iran? Which was my favourite Bond film? He wrote down my responses. Suddenly he looked up from his notes and said: “You’re going to be hanged.”

Scientists made the skin of mice transparent using a common food dye

From Scientific American: “In mere minutes, smearing mice with a common food dye can make a desired portion of their skin almost as transparent as glass. In a study published in Science, researchers spread a solution of the dye tartrazine, a common coloring for foods, drugs and cosmetics, onto living mice to turn their tissues clear—creating a temporary window that revealed organs, muscles and blood vessels in their body. The procedure—a new form of a technique known as “optical tissue clearing”—has not yet been tested in humans, but it may someday offer a way to view and monitor injuries or diseases without the need of specialized imaging equipment or invasive surgery. The fats and proteins in skin typically have higher refractive indexes than the water, which creates a contrast that you can’t see through. In the study, Ou and his colleagues looked for light-absorbing molecules that could make the various refractive indexes within the layers of skin more similar—reducing the amount of light scattered throughout.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “How a journalist became the Taliban’s portrait artist”

Hi everyone! Just wanted you to know that I’ve launched a newsletter about technology and society called “The Torment Nexus,” where I will be writing analysis and commentary about technology and culture. I was recently laid off from my job as the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I have been writing since 2017 about the intersection of technology, media, and culture, so I decided to run this up the old flagpole and see if anyone salutes 😄

I’m publishing The Torment Nexus via Ghost, an open-source publishing system, as I do my other newsletter, a collection of interesting, odd, and/or unusual links called When The Going Gets Weird. If you’re more comfortable with Substack, I’m also publishing it through that software as well, and if you prefer to read it the old-fashioned way, I will also be posting some or all of the posts here on my website, as I do with almost everything I write. Feel free to share this and other posts with anyone you think might have an interest in these kinds of topics!

In case the name Torment Nexus doesn’t ring a bell, it comes from a hilarious meme that Alex Blechman—a writer for The Onion—came up with awhile back, and I think it sums up so much about where we are right now in terms of our relationship with technology. Here Alex’s original tweet:

Continue reading “Welcome to The Torment Nexus”

From Esquire: “Heidi Guilford rode shotgun in her boyfriend’s white Dodge Charger. Her stepsister and a couple friends sat in the back, with the windows rolled down for the smokers. It was a cool night in June—sweatshirt weather—an unremarkable Sunday on an island off the coast of Maine. Roger seemed upset, bordering on frantic, going on about Dorian and Briannah Ames, a married couple who lived down on Roberts Cemetery Road, about a half mile out of town. He said the Ameses had been harassing him, that he was sick of it, and that nothing was being done about it.It all happened so fast. Less than twenty minutes after leaving the parking lot, Roger was bleeding to death in the back seat of Isles’s car. The group of friends, stunned, believed they had just witnessed a homicide—one lobsterman killing another with an ax in a bloody brawl. But did they? A man died—was killed, in what the state itself said was a homicide—and yet to this day, no one has been charged with a single crime related to his death.”

Lincoln shared a bed with a man for four years and fell into a deep depression when he died

From People: “Abraham Lincoln was, by most accounts, the greatest president the United States has ever had. He led the country through the Civil War and played a pivotal role in the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. But through his professional and political triumphs, he is said to have suffered from crippling, lifelong depression. It’s a side of the great American president that history books don’t typically dwell on, and the new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln takes a look at another aspect of Lincoln’s life that often has gone overlooked: his sexuality. The documentary covers Lincoln’s relationships with several men over the years, most notably Joshua Speed, the co-owner of a general store with whom the future U.S. president shared a bed — for four years. The film features interviews with more than a dozen scholars and historians and offers letters and never-before-seen photos, while laying out the thesis that Lincoln was probably gay or at least bisexual.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “They saw a man killed with an ax but no one was ever charged”

From Curbed: “Sometimes Wu remembers how his family balked when he told them he was going to start ratting out lawbreakers in New York City. But for a chance at making nearly $90 for a minute of his time, he found he could push their skepticism to the bottom of his consciousness.The source of the money was the city itself, thanks to the Citizens Air Complaint Program, which allows members of the public to claim a reward by sending in videos of buses and trucks that idle illegally. The statutory limit for leaving your engine running is three minutes. But on a block with a school, that drops to 60 seconds, which is what has now drawn Wu several times to this particular block in Manhattan that’s being poisoned by the pooling diesel exhaust of nearly a dozen yellow school buses. Wearing a mask to filter out the acrid tang of sulfates and carbon soot, Wu uses his phone’s camera to capture the license plates and company markings on the buses.”

Was Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, murdered?

From History.com: “On September 29, 1913, Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the engine that bears his name, disappears from the steamship Dresden while traveling from Antwerp, Belgium to Harwich, England. On October 10, a Belgian sailor aboard a North Sea steamer spotted a body floating in the water; upon further investigation, it turned out that the body was Diesel’s. There was, and remains, a great deal of mystery surrounding his death: It was officially judged a suicide, but many people believed (and still believe) that Diesel was murdered. Diesel patented a design for his engine on February 28, 1892 and at the time of his death, he was on his way to England to attend the groundbreaking of a new diesel-engine plant—and to meet with the British navy about installing his engine on their submarines. Conspiracy theories began to fly almost immediately: “Inventor Thrown Into the Sea to Stop Sale of Patents to British Government,” read one headline.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “You can make six figures in New York by reporting idling trucks”